Living By The Razorblade
by Shade Embry
Summary: How did Jeffrey Spender get from "One Son" to "William"?


TITLE: Living By The Razorblade  
  
AUTHOR: Brittany "Thespis" Frederick  
  
E-MAIL: AgentThespis@msn.com  
  
RATING: PG  
  
CATEGORY: Drama, Coda, Vignette  
  
SPOILERS: William  
  
SUMMARY: How did Jeffrey Spender get from "One Son" to "William"?  
  
RECOMMENDED LISTENING: "Unglued" from La Femme Nikita (quoted)  
  
  
  
There always seemed to be a sense of atonement. No matter what, it was never enough. The DNA had damned him from the start. The resulting years were torturous, full of lifesaving procedures, boiling emotions and conflict. And all the people he had once believed would give a damn didn't. He was on his own and it hit him like the bullet had shredded his face.  
  
1 Just a few words connected loosely to my heart  
  
He'd been in the ICU recovering from hours and hours of surgery the first time he had heard the quiet song that would come to symbolize so much, playing over the speakers just as he tormented himself with thoughts of suicide.  
  
Floating away just like balloons in the dark  
  
That was when he finally realized it. If he really wanted to, he could kill himself a thousand times over. But if he killed himself, they won. They would have manipulated him, twisted him, broken him, and they would win, because he would not be there to say otherwise. That idea of his father's last victory kept him from death's door, stoked a personal fury.  
  
So why did you retrieve them  
  
And it was fury that fueled everything after. He couldn't stand mirrors, so he rid himself of them all, breaking more than a few on the way. Lights generally fell in the same category. The anger had no focus. He didn't know who – what – he was. His father had bred such a superior streak in him that he kept fighting himself. Until he realized he had blood connections to something more than terror.  
  
Why did you believe them all  
  
It was looking at Mulder that he found his first glimmer of focusing the powerful negative emotions that continued to stay within him long after the initial turbulence had faded. He was related to Mulder, too. Mulder, who had done so much to bring the evils of people like his father to light. What kept him from being more like Mulder instead of more like his father?  
  
Just a few thoughts so careless, and on and on they go  
  
The rage became a missile, the conspiracy a target. They could break his body, after all, but they could not steal his knowledge. He could still do something. He was still alive. That meant something. Maybe Mulder could forgive him his sins if he made an atonement.  
  
There's hardly time to notice  
  
As he tentatively reached out to begin his assailment, things began to come back to him. He realized how easy it was to drop the physical body and return to being himself in spirit, drawing back on those last days before the shot, trying to resume where he had left off in the face of such insanity. It was not easy.  
  
Barely time to grow  
  
Time, he knew, was as much an enemy as the conspiracy, and as real as when they had come after him. Once they knew he was still surviving, he would undoubtedly become a target. Unlike years ago, he vowed not to go down without a fight. He had stood there and let his father shoot him, paralyzed with fear. This time, he was a different man.  
  
So how'd you ever see them  
  
Following Mulder's legacy lead him to Scully, obviously. The hardest part was mastering the difficulties and changes that had occurred in Scully's life in the years having passed. It was not the kind of change that happened to normal people over years. Even in death, the evil permeated her life – and it made the battle an uphill one.  
  
Why do you believe them all  
  
Largely, he retreated back into his own mind, learning to shape himself by working backwards and turning the spineless creature he once had been into a warrior-scholar. He had to erase the past. Orwell came to mind more than once.  
  
Holding every piece you tossed out  
  
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."  
  
Nothing fits without you around  
  
But the further he changed, he felt himself slipping away from himself. In other words, he had to become part of what he hated to conquer that diabolical machine. Morality and achievement ground together. A lot of the time, morality lost. It would all work out in the end, he kept lying to himself. An ultimate atonement would forgive all sins.  
  
Like it did before we came unglued  
  
With focus came control, with control came a slow recovery, until he was finally able to face himself to an extent he felt comfortable with and the plans began to gel in his head. Slowly, things fell into place. All he really had left to do was muster the courage to act.  
  
The sun we walk to each day is starting to rise again  
  
Standing on that penultimate edge, a final shift began. His father, the murdered ones, the conspiracy participants, all the ghosts that had haunted him began to fall away. They began to clear from his vision and his thoughts, no longer lay in wait at the back of his complex plans or his dreams. He found himself for the first time in a long while standing alone.  
  
I haven't any sleep yet, don't know where you've been  
  
Alone. It sounded hollow and yet all-empowering. This would be his success, his failure. If he could get to Scully, to the child, to whatever happened, maybe he could right something before that dark hand raised itself again. Time, fate, his own DNA were all against him. But after all this, he had come to believe willpower could conquer it all.  
  
I wonder if you see it  
  
And that was how he had ended up in the X-Files basement with that card key in the dead of night, sacrificing himself and doing whatever possible to find Scully and the next phase, to get to her and to accomplish his ends. He was able to let go of his father's ghost by staring into the face of destiny and not turning away. That was how he had survived.  
  
I wonder if you see it at all  
  
He, like Mulder, only wanted to believe. 


End file.
